Análise dos efeitos da atividade econômica nas emissões de gases de efeito estufa no Brasil

Abstract

There is a worldwide effort to identify the causes of greenhouse gas intensification and to establish appropriate measures to reduce the advance of anthropogenic GHG emissions. The use of fossil fuel is taken as the main source of carbon dioxide emission, considered the most important anthropogenic GHG. However, the main source of this gas in Brazil is land-use change. The present study proposed to analyze for Brazil the relationships between GHG emissions, considering its various origins, economic activity, considering GDP, and energy production. It was used a error correction vector (VEC), applied to multivariate time series with cointegrated components. The analyzed period covered the years from 1970 to 2017. The results showed long-term equilibrium relation in the analyzed system. It has been estimated that 1% GDP growth implies a 0.5% increase in GHG emissions. Emissions also rise by 0.72% in the face of a 1% increase in energy production from non-renewable sources and reduce by 2.16% due to a 1% increase in energy production from renewable sources. It can be inferred that there is an important dependency on GHG emissions in relation to the production of energy by renewable sources. The results suggest that the development of policies and the incentive to investments aimed at increasing the production of this type of energy can contribute to the reduction of emissions in Brazil.